Fistfight at Washington Post?

I saw this earlier on Romenesko and was surprised to not find a thread here (unless I missed it). Apparently, one staffer called another a "cocksucker," the other guy went after him, and the top editor broke up the fight. In the Style section, of all places:

This sounds very similar to a ferocious fight I once witnessed with the same sort of verbiage----it was a couple of schoolgirls in the seventh grade. Our skinny, Barney Fyfe-type teacher (male) tried to break them up and he got the crap kicked out out of him.

From what I read the editor (who was a short-timer who took a buyout and only had weeks left) and was putting down a reporter while he was editing her copy, in front of her and others. A co-worker stepped up and said "you don't have to be such a cocksucker" and the fists flew.

My biggest surprise was the exec ed was in the same zip code as the style section on a Friday evening. Aren't most Style sections located about as far away from the suits as possible?

The Post's Gene Weingarten <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/10/01/DI2009100102668.html#1103">weighs in</a> on the fight, the pugilists and a root cause that will hit home for many of us:

"I don't know the ultimate precipitating factor in what led to blows between these two guys on Friday -- for all I know, Manuel strangled Henry's cat. But I do know what I read, that the proximate cause was the quality of written word -- what we put in the paper. It doesn't surprise me."

The Post's Gene Weingarten <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2009/10/01/DI2009100102668.html#1103">weighs in</a> on the fight, the pugilists and a root cause that will hit home for many of us:

"I don't know the ultimate precipitating factor in what led to blows between these two guys on Friday -- for all I know, Manuel strangled Henry's cat. But I do know what I read, that the proximate cause was the quality of written word -- what we put in the paper. It doesn't surprise me."

Click to expand...

Huge Weingarten fan, of course, and I can hope that's true. But no matter how bad things get, there should be a sense of decorum. Someone tells me to my face that my story is the second-worst he's ever seen, I don't care what the reason is. That's rude. Calling someone a cocksucker, also rude.

Maybe I just wasn't around for the glory days of journalism, I don't know.